AI-focused Astera Labs, Inc. gave Wall Street a welcome wake-up call today – Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024 – with the unveiling of its plans to go public. The chip connectivity products, software and platform developer’s IPO is estimated at a placeholder figure of $100 million. Some on the Street believe that Astera Labs’ IPO could raise five times that or so. Astera Labs’ S-1 filing (prospectus) is dated Feb. 20, 2024. But the SEC did not make the filing available until today. The Astera Labs filing leaves a lot of items blank: It does not include a proposed stock symbol for the IPO, which is a NASDAQ listing, and it does not disclose the IPO’s terms.
Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are the joint lead book-runners. Barclays, Deutsche Bank Securities, Evercore ISI and Jefferies make up the rest of the joint book-running team.
The Santa Clara, California-based company, founded in 2017, says in the prospectus:
“Our mission is to innovate, design, and deliver semiconductor-based connectivity solutions that are purpose-built to unleash the full potential of cloud and AI infrastructure.
“Building on years of experience with a singular focus on addressing connectivity challenges in data-centric systems, we have developed and deployed our leading Intelligent Connectivity Platform built from the ground up for cloud and AI infrastructure. Our Intelligent Connectivity Platform comprises:
“-Semiconductor-based, high-speed, mixed-signal connectivity products that integrate a matrix of microcontrollers and sensors; and
“-COSMOS, our software suite which is embedded in our connectivity products and integrated into our customers’ systems.”
Astera Labs says that its Intelligent Connectivity Platform gives its customers “the ability to deploy and operate high-performance cloud and AI infrastructure at scale, addressing an increasingly diverse set of requirements. We provide our connectivity products in various form factors, including ICs, boards, and modules.”
From the prospectus, there’s more: “AI touches many aspects of our daily lives today, from vision processing for autonomous vehicles to speech recognition systems for chatbots. According to IDC, by 2025, the Global 2000 organizations will allocate over 40% of their core IT spend to AI-related initiatives, leading to a double-digit increase in the rate of product and process innovations. The shift towards the cloud from on-premise computing is rapidly accelerating due to increasing demand for compute-intensive AI workloads that are truly optimized when deployed at cloud scale.”
Astera Labs is not profitable. For the year ended 2023, Astera Labs reported a net loss of $26.3 million on revenue of $115.8 million, according to financial statements in the prospectus.
(For more information about these companies, please check the IPO Calendar and the individual IPO Profiles found on our website: IPOScoop.com )
Note: Never trade on proposed symbols. They have been known to change and you might buy something on the OTC Bulletin Board.
To see what time the NASDAQ IPOs are expected to trade, please log in to: NASDAQTrader.com then scroll down to IPO Message.
Disclosure: Nobody on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned above, nor do they trade or invest in IPOs. The IPOScoop.com staff does not issue advice, recommendations or opinions.
Disclaimer: A SCOOP Rating (Wall Street Consensus of Opening-day Premiums) is a general consensus taken, at press time, from Wall Street and investment professionals concerning how well an IPO might perform when it starts trading. The SCOOP Rating does not reflect the opinions of anyone associated with IPOScoop.com. The SCOOP ratings should not be taken as investment advice. The rating merely reflects the opinion of the professionals at the time of publication and is subject to last-minute changes due to market conditions, changes in a specific offering and other factors, such as changes in the proposed offering terms and the shifting of investor interest in the IPO. The information offered is taken from sources we believe to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee the accuracy.